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One Sunday in 1988, thirteen-year-old Joe Coutts learns that his mother has been the victim of a brutal attack by a man on their North Dakota reservation.
Joe’s mother is traumatized and afraid. She takes to her bed, and refuses to talk to anyone – including the police; meanwhile his father, a tribal judge, endeavours to wrest justice from a situation that defies his keenest efforts; and young Joe’s moral and emotional landscape shifts on its child’s axis.
Frustrated, confused and nursing a complicated fury, Joe sets out with his best friends Cappy, Zack and Angus in search of answers that might put his mother’s attacker behind bars – and set his family’s world straight again. Or so he hopes.
The Round House is a powerful and deeply humane story of a young boy pitched prematurely into an unjust adult world. It confirms Louise Erdrich as one of America’s most distinctive contemporary novelists.
Joe’s mother is traumatized and afraid. She takes to her bed, and refuses to talk to anyone – including the police; meanwhile his father, a tribal judge, endeavours to wrest justice from a situation that defies his keenest efforts; and young Joe’s moral and emotional landscape shifts on its child’s axis.
Frustrated, confused and nursing a complicated fury, Joe sets out with his best friends Cappy, Zack and Angus in search of answers that might put his mother’s attacker behind bars – and set his family’s world straight again. Or so he hopes.
The Round House is a powerful and deeply humane story of a young boy pitched prematurely into an unjust adult world. It confirms Louise Erdrich as one of America’s most distinctive contemporary novelists.
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Reviews
The Round House is filled with stunning language that recalls shades of Faulkner, Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison. Deeply moving, this novel ranks among Erdrich's best work, and it is impossible to forget.
Erdrich threads a gripping mystery and multilayered portrait of a community through a deeply affecting coming-of-age novel.
Emotionally compelling...Joe is an incredibly endearing narrator, full of urgency and radiant candor...the story he tells transforms a sad, isolated crime into a revelation about how maturity alters our relationship with our parents, delivering us into new kinds of love and pain.
The Round House showcases [Erdrich's] extraordinary ability to delineate the ties of love, resentment, need, duty and sympathy that bind families together...[a] powerful novel.
Detailed and nuanced, it is Erdrich's portrayal of the Native American reservation that makes The Round House stand out as a work of literary fiction.
The Round House is an extraordinary, engrossing novel, which should live long in the memory.
A compelling coming-of-age story ... [Erdrich] is a gifted storyteller who brings all these characters and tales together with sureness and grace.
A rare insight into the dilemma of an adolescent caught between two cultures.
Erdrich has achieved an impressive trick; a spellbinding read, an earnest message and fierce emotional punch.
A gripping mystery with a moral twist: revenge might be the harshest punishment, but only for the victims.